


vieni a vivere

by amillionsmiles



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Post-Endgame
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-25
Updated: 2020-02-25
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:20:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22887727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amillionsmiles/pseuds/amillionsmiles
Summary: Sometimes Steve would choose to sit in the corner of a piazza and people-watch, sketching. Natasha would venture off on her own, ducking into colorful leather shops, chasing the dribble of her melting gelato with her tongue.  Once, she stopped on the street for a caricature artist.  It amused her, to be studied and then so deliberately exaggerated.“Hmph,” Steve grumbled later, examining the picture.  “I could have drawn you for free.”Natasha, Steve, and a whirlwind tour of Italy.
Relationships: Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov, Steve Rogers/Natasha Romanov
Comments: 43
Kudos: 183





	vieni a vivere

**Author's Note:**

> This is an AU in which Clint is the one to sacrifice himself at Vormir instead, and Natasha copes with the aftermath. (Also, Steve doesn't do the whole time jump back to Peggy thing). It's also a 4000 word excuse for me to relive my time abroad but with PINING and BEDSHARING and BANTER. No, I will not be taking any further questions.

_“Natasha,” said Clint, every syllable another twitch of his fingers, his hand working itself free from her grip. “I’m not saving you from dying. I’m asking you to live.”_

_._

_._

_._

There was no safehouse in which to disappear from grief.

So Natasha went to Missouri, where Laura Barton took one look at her and knew. A flock of birds carved through the clear blue sky. The tall, dry stalks of wheat stood at attention. Cooper, Lila, and Nate came running in from the fields to find their mother and their Auntie Nat collapsed on the porch, holding each other, rocking.

“I had a hunch,” Laura admitted later, after they had done their best to tuck the children into bed. “When he didn’t call.”

“I’m sorry,” Natasha tried for the third, fourth, fifth time, the bile rising in her throat again. “We tried so hard. I wanted—”

“Five years.” Laura rest her head against the wall. She looked as young as the day Natasha had met her, except for her eyes. They fixated just over Natasha’s shoulder, on the family photo framed above the dresser. “It didn’t feel like that. You know I wouldn’t believe it, if not for… he finished the shed while we were gone.”

“Never could keep himself still,” said Natasha, thinking of Tokyo and the rain and the erratic dot she’d followed on the holo-map at her desk. The gentler things, too: bandaging her wounds that first time, when she’d been nothing but startled and feral. Rushing to hold a three-year-old Cooper as he climbed Clint like a tree. Dragging the couch one way, then another, then back again.

“Will you stay?” Laura’s voice broke her from the memory. 

Every part of the house creaked with his presence. The bookshelves, the floorboards, the bottom drawer he’d stubbornly cleared out the very first time he’d brought her by _because it’s you, Natasha, damnit, now hand me your things._ It hurt, but it was a hurt she owed him gladly, and Natasha closed her eyes and let it seep into her bones.

“Yes.”

*

Lila had Clint’s steady hands, the same way of looking down her nose and tilting her chin back. Cooper had his squint and his hair. Nate had his smile.

For a time it was enough, being their aunt. Reading picture books. Cutting the crusts off sandwiches. Sometimes Nate woke up in the middle of the night crying for his dad and Natasha would lay there, listening as Laura tried to comfort him. It got better. It got worse.

“Nobody in this house blames you for what happened,” Laura said from the doorway, watching Natasha fold a shirt and tuck it away in her duffel.

“I know.” The arrow necklace at her throat burned.

“Will you come back?” Lila asked as they bid their goodbyes. She was getting tall, the top of her head nearly at Natasha’s collarbone. Natasha ran a hand down the braid she’d tied for Lila that morning and closed her eyes, squeezing the girl closer.

“Promise,” she said, because she’d helped bring this world back and she’d be damned if she let it do anything to stop her. 

On the way to the airport, she called Sam.

*

“Journaling helps.”

They sat in Sam’s office. The oak furniture gleamed warm and familiar. He had a bruise on his right cheek, but other than that he looked healthy. Fulfilled, even. Natasha glanced at the shield propped behind his desk; Sam followed her gaze toward it and nodded, leaning forward.

“You know what he said when he gave it to me?”

“What?”

“‘We got the world back, but it’s a new one. Maybe I need something new, too.’” He tilted his head. 

“I have a list,” Natasha said quietly. “Not of targets. Places.”

Sam smiled. “There you go. That’s a start.”

*

She found Steve at a sunny gym studio in Brooklyn teaching a class of 30-year-old women how to punch.

“Be honest, now,” she said as they entered the juice and salad bar right next door, “how many dates have you been asked on?”

“None,” Steve said, making it a point to study the menu even though Natasha’s reconnaissance had shown her that he came here every day after work. “I keep things strictly professional.”

They found a table by one of the windows. Natasha took a sip of her smoothie and wrinkled her nose—a bit heavy on the carrots, but it tasted healthy, at least.

“Does this new job of yours come with vacation?”

Steve set down his fork, lettuce and chicken drizzled with peanut sauce still stuck on its tines. The gray instructor’s V-neck looked good on him, the studio’s logo printed neatly in black. 

“What’s this about, Nat?”

“I’m thinking of traveling for a while.” She focused on the straw in front of her, rolling it between index finger and thumb. “I’m trying to figure out who to be without… all of it.” 

Steve leaned back in his chair. His finger tapped against the table once, twice. 

He had a right to say no, Natasha told herself. When they’d told each other to get lives, neither had stipulated what that had to look like. Soul-searching was probably more effective when done alone, anyways.

But that didn’t stop the surge of relief when he said, “I’m in.”

*

The park swing squeaked under her weight.

“Sorry to take him from you.”

Bucky half-squinted at her, then swept his gaze farther out. They had come a long way since Soviet slugs and the freeway, Sam’s car.

“Nah, he needs this as much as you do. Just do me a favor and bring him back in one piece, will you?”

Natasha nudged him with her shoe. Bucky scuffed the gravel right back.

“Take care of yourself,” he added, a little softer. “Don’t let it chase you down.”

*

Natasha hadn’t flown internationally in a good, old-fashioned commercial airline for years, and she planned on enjoying every minute of the eight-hour journey. For the first hour and a half she busied herself finishing _Ancillary Justice_ on her kindle, Dean Martin crooning _Mambo Italiano_ in her ear through the in-flight music selection.

She’d chosen Italy because she liked the way the language burst free of your mouth. That, and she appreciated the scrappiness of the country: a patchwork history of kingdoms, duchies, and republics expanding and contracting, managing to unify; the fierce sense of local identity married with proud celebration of a Roman past. Natasha cared little for regimes, but she admired the people who lived through them.

“Last time I was in Italy was 1943,” Steve said on hour 3, peeling back the plastic wrap on the salmon and penne they’d been given for dinner. “I only really got to see the military camps, though.”

“Well, I promise not to make you deliver any rousing speeches,” said Natasha. “This trip is strictly pleasure. No business.”

“Not gonna argue with that.” He caught her reading the captions off his screen and took the earbud from his left ear, offering it to her. “You know you’ve got your own monitor, right?”

“Shut up, Rogers, I’m trying to watch this movie.”

*

Cinque Terre looked like someone had taken a grandmother’s box of buttons and threads and sent it tumbling into the sea. The houses sprawled on top of each other in an assortment of confectionary colors—pale blues and pinks, lemon yellow, deep red.

On the trail down from Vernazza to Corniglia, Natasha stopped to admire Monterossa in the distance, the sun beating down between her shoulder blades. Steve stood beside her, hands on his hips as he surveyed the landscape. He cut a striking figure with his CamelBak; more than one group of hikers passing them by craned their necks to spare a second glance. It wasn’t because of the Cap aura, though. He just looked—handsome. Nice. The kind of guy you’d stop at the side of the road for if he held his thumb out as a hitchhiker. 

A mosquito landed on his bicep and Natasha reached over to smack it, flicking its remains off the palm of her hand.

“Can’t have any of these guys flying around with your super serum in their bodies,” she teased. “What do you think would happen?”

Steve cracked a grin. “They’d probably be even more stubborn and harder to kill.”

Loose gravel crunched on the path beside them. A group of elderly—Natasha guessed they must be in their early 80s—walked by. The man in the front wore a navy baseball cap and held a rust orange walking stick. He was telling a story about his trek along the Camino de Santiago but paused to appraise them.

“Stopped already?”

“We’re pacing ourselves,” Natasha said cheerfully.

“Don’t let us old geezers beat you!” he called over his shoulder, continuing on; one of the women in the group joked, “If I sat down to rest I think I’d throw out my hip getting back up,” and the rest of them laughed, the sound swallowed by the green trees and cliffside terraces as they rounded the bend. Natasha wondered, not for the first time, if this was what having parents and grandparents would have felt like.

“Should we catch up to them and tell them your actual age?”

In response, Steve hopped off the rock. “Come on, Romanoff,” he said, and for a moment they were the newly minted leaders of a ragtag team of superheroes again—the clipboard’s weight in her hand, their footsteps in sync as they went out to meet Wanda and Vision and the rest— _then let’s whip them into shape._ Who else could she have stood by all these years?

“I’m not getting any younger!” called Steve, already at the bottom of the hill, the asshole—rolling her eyes, Natasha followed. 

*

The dream always started in the water.

The purple dunes around her brought her splashing to her feet. Above her, the eclipsed sun winked, and she was back on Vormir’s unforgiving peak, shoulder screaming in pain as she tried to reel Clint’s dead weight up.

_Natasha—_

_No, no, **no—** you bastard, don’t let go, don’t you dare let go—_

Like a fish, Clint’s hand wriggled out of hers. The cry tore free of her throat and she clawed at the air, fingernails digging into—

“Nat. _Nat._ ”

An arm wrapped around her waist, holding her up. The rocking motion brought her to her senses and she turned, burrowing her nose into Steve’s shoulder, needing to be anywhere else. He smelled like cotton and lavender, courtesy of their Airbnb host’s shower gel, the fabric of his tank top well-worn and familiar, more gray than white in the darkness.

“Hey,” he murmured. 

The last time he’d held her this close they’d been in a bunker in New Jersey, hoping to survive a missile. Somehow, it seemed like a simpler time.

 _Deep breaths, Natasha. Count to ten._ She did it in Russian, then twice more in French and Italian. When it no longer felt as if her heart were plummeting through her stomach, she pulled back. 

“You good?” Steve pushed a lock of hair away from her forehead, eyes searching hers.

“Yeah.” It came out strained—a sound that wanted to be a laugh but couldn’t. “It’s just—” She raised her hand and made a twisting motion with her fingers. “You know.”

Steve leaned back against the headboard to give her space. A small strip of carpet and a bedside table separated their beds, and Natasha noted the disarray of his sheets, the evidence of haste. None of it betrayed by his face, which adopted a careful expression as he studied her now.

“I have a question. You don’t have to answer it right this moment.”

“What is it.”

“This trip, Nat… is it for yourself? Or is it for Clint?”

_I’m not saving you from dying, Natasha. I’m asking you to live._

_Trick question, Rogers,_ Natasha wanted to say. _There **is** no me—the way I am now—without Clint._

“I just need to know. We promised we’d always be honest with each other.”

He was hurting, too. When they’d first been partnered together all those long years ago, Natasha had been drawn to his loneliness; it had fascinated her, the idea of America’s golden boy left behind by everyone he’d known. Now she knew better, of course. The dry humor and the rule-breaking, the furrow between those blue eyes, the black and white photograph tucked away in a pocket watch, kept close to the heart.

“What about you?” she asked. “Who are you traveling to leave behind?”

Steve considered, looking to the side. She tried to follow his gaze but couldn’t make out what he was looking at in the dark, if maybe he was just admiring the paisley wallpaper instead.

“My old self,” he said, finally. “He’s a stubborn bastard, though. Keeps running to catch up.”

Natasha cracked a smile. “Mine likes waiting in the shadows.”

“Let’s make a deal, then,” said Steve, extending a hand. “Whichever of us gets to the other side of this first, we pull the other one along, okay?”

She took it and squeezed and thought: _don’t let go._

*

“It’s not very high up,” Steve said, frowning at the balcony.

Natasha adjusted the braid over her left shoulder. “People were shorter back then. What, does the lack of height kill the romance for you?”

“Not exactly.”

He was right, though: Juliet’s balcony was little more than a pink stone box jutting out into the courtyard, ivy crawling up the wall next to it. They’d passed through a graffiti-covered and gum-strewn wall to get to it, a little tunnel off the wider, smoother street of Via Capello. Natasha liked that about Verona: the streets were clean and broad, yet the city was still small enough that you felt cradled by it. Charming.

In the interest of being less conspicuous, Steve had worn a baseball cap, but that didn’t stop a few people from sneaking photos. Sunnily, he overlooked them, choosing to focus on the bronze statue in the corner, polished golden by the touch of thousands of hands.

“So let me get this straight,” he said, reading the informational plaque nearby, “touching Juliet’s right breast is supposed to bring good luck?”

“In love, specifically,” Natasha clarified. “You should do it. When’s the last time you went on a date?”

“Not this _again,_ Nat.”

“I’m just saying, we brought the other half of Earth’s population back. Your odds are no longer as shitty. Not that they were that bad to begin with.”

“Oh, yeah?” The smile he leveled at her was disarming. It took her by surprise—ten years by his side, yet the supersoldier still had a few new tricks. 

Deflecting, Natasha said: “Speaking of breasts, you know you grab your left boob when you’re laughing.”

Steve looked scandalized. “I do _not._ ”

She reached over and twisted.

“Na _tash_ a.”

“For good luck,” she cackled, merciless, and darted away.

*

After fighting aliens, traveling to other galaxies, and resurrecting half of existence, these were the things Natasha believed in: warm pelmeni, a good dye job, and the quiet grandeur of churches, even if she wasn’t so sure about God. Florence’s church to capita ratio kept her plenty busy. It wasn’t that she was chasing salvation or forgiveness, necessarily. Just that stained glass and measured arches gave her a certain peace of mind, one she still struggled to reclaim at night.

She hadn’t realized how deeply it had infiltrated her routine until she and Steve checked into their Airbnb.

“There’s a couch in the main room,” said Steve as they eyed the sole bed.

It had become a sort of symbiosis. Steve got in his head during the day, so Natasha planned itineraries to keep them busy. Natasha mourned at night, so Steve comforted her. It happened frequently and without much discussion. Sometimes he went back to his own mattress, but more often, they drifted back to sleep alongside each other—so often, apparently, that her subconscious had stopped looking for two separate beds when she made reservations.

“We can share,” Natasha decided, tossing her duffel at the base of the bed and moving to check out the bathroom. “We’re adults.”

The old Natasha would have thought things over a little more, perhaps. Weighed the merits and drawbacks of this arrangement, what it meant to sleep beside but not sleep _with_. Especially Steve, who had a funny way of looking at her sometimes as she argued with street vendors or pulled them into random courtyards—a weighted pause, filled with equal parts exasperation, amusement, and an affection that Natasha hesitated to name. The new Natasha went to bed with her hair wet and a towel on her pillow and woke up with her cheek pressed against his bicep, Steve already alert and scrolling through his phone with his free hand. Upon sensing her stir, he glanced over, eyebrows slightly raised. If she weren’t so good at feigning nonchalance, she’d have blushed. 

Instead, she probed: “What are you thinking, Rogers?”

“I’m thinking,” he said, setting his phone down and shifting to prop himself up on an elbow, “that we should talk about this thing between us.”

She wrinkled her nose. “‘Thing?’”

“Unless you’ve got a better name for it.”

“Here in the 21st century, we don’t care much for labels.”

“So I’ve been reading. The Atlantic paints a kind of grim landscape for love. Did you know that we’re in the middle of a sex recession?”

Natasha rolled over so that she was on her stomach, cheek pillowed on the backs of her hands. “Are you propositioning me right now, Steve?”

“No, but.” He shrugged, considering. “I hear friends with benefits is all the rage.”

Natasha laughed. “The ‘benefits’ part of that isn’t talking about retirement.”

Slowly, Steve blinked at her, the picture of feigned innocence. “Isn’t it?”

*

Natasha wasn’t stupid. The five years post-Snap had wrung it out of her, but she remembered flirting. For her, it had been a game. When needed, a weapon or a wall.

Steve, though. He meant what he gave. Subtle but honest: an invitation, there for the taking, if she wanted it.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. When Natasha had been younger, her list of wants was small: bread, water, the light of another day. Then they’d grown loftier: acceptance, redemption.

Steve smiled, and she thought that perhaps there was room for something in between.

*

They didn’t spend all their time together. Sometimes Steve would choose to sit in the corner of a piazza and people-watch, sketching. Natasha would venture off on her own, ducking into colorful leather shops, chasing the dribble of her melting gelato with her tongue. Once, she stopped on the street for a caricature artist. It amused her, to be studied and then so deliberately exaggerated.

“Hmph,” Steve grumbled later, examining the picture. “I could have drawn you for free.”

The light through the curtains created a glare on his tablet, which was open to the day’s crossword. Steve had started them as part of his cultural catch-up. Natasha often helped due to her arsenal of disparate factoids and interests, courtesy of all the covers she’d shuffled through over the years. 

“Work in Italy,” Steve read. “Five letters.”

“Opera,” Natasha said, not missing a beat as she stirred some honey into her tea. The under-the-breath _hm_ of satisfaction told her that she’d guessed correctly.

“We should see one.”

“Not a bad plan,” said Natasha, finally joining him at the small, tiled table near the window. “Are you feeling more Puccini or Verdi?”

“Nobody likes a know-it-all,” Steve said, though the smile playing on his lips told her otherwise.

“Funny,” Natasha quipped. “I thought that was why you kept me around.”

*

She went in a floor-length black gown. The old training said it was because black hid most stains, and knife and gun were easily stowed in a garter. But the truth was that Natasha had chosen it because she liked the way Steve’s eyes lingered on her just a bit longer, and the low-cut back meant she felt every callus on his palm when he put a hand to support her as they climbed up the stairs to their seats.

“You know I’ve done this before.”

“It crossed my mind once or twice.” Gallantly, Steve offered an arm. “Do you object?”

Somewhere, there was a movie like this—a swell of string music, a camera rolling. Steve’s bowtie sat as a dark knot at the base of his neck. _You clean up well,_ Natasha had said earlier that evening, but what she’d meant was: _I’m glad it’s you._

They settled in, the stage gilded and opulent. _When in Rome,_ Natasha thought, the velvet seats plush against her back. She tapped her heels against the floor once, testing the acoustics of what she could hear. Two rows over, a French couple murmured to each other.

Natasha had attended operas before, as covers. And so, when the first deep note was sung, she looked to Steve. Saw the way he straightened and leaned forward slightly, as if someone had extended a hook into his chest and tugged him forward. An intensity overtook her, because in that moment he wasn’t supersoldier or teammate or partner, just achingly unguarded, human in a way that hurt. Human in a way that she could have.

When intermission came, she excused herself to the balcony to get some air. Happiness winded her. For so long, all her contentment had been inextricable from relief—at having been accepted, at having survived. To have it stand on its own felt impossible; a gauntlet not meant for her to wear, a feeling she couldn’t possibly hold in this way.

“Nat.” Steve’s voice sounded from behind her. “Are you okay?”

Blinking through watery eyes, she turned. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to go all _Pretty Woman_ on you.”

The corner of Steve’s mouth tightened and he took a step forward. He wore disappointment well. She could appreciate it even if she hated that it was being directed toward her.

“Don’t _do_ that, Nat,” he said, quiet.

“Do what?”

“Play pretend. Wasn’t that the point of this trip? To find out who you were underneath it all? To just let yourself be?” And oh, hadn’t he said the same thing to Tony, when they were younger and snapping at each other’s throats, and how did she balance that against a world in which Tony was dead. What did it mean to want something for herself, after everything? To want this?

“What are you when you aren’t planning, or fighting?” pressed Steve, and he was too much bright and too much close but Natasha wanted, just once, to step into a blaze of her own making; not because her back was against a wall or because there were regimes to topple, but because she felt deserving of the life she’d live on the other side.

“I’m terrified,” she confessed.

“Me, too,” he said, and held her. And didn’t let go.

*

When the alarm went off, Steve mumbled against her shoulder: “I’m gonna be honest with you—I’m getting kinda sick of all these churches.”

The old adage was that in Italy, the farther south one traveled, the slower life became. Bright-colored Sicily coated Natasha’s edges like a candy drop, crystallizing her in its sparkling waters, the lush gooeyness of cheese spilling from fresh arancini.

Sated, still, from last night’s wine and seafood, Natasha turned in the circle of Steve’s arms, conjuring her most doe-eyed expression. “That’s not very schoolboy of you.”

An arched eyebrow. The ghost of a kiss on her collarbone. The stroke of his thumb over her forearm set the hairs there standing on end. “Maybe there’s something else I’d like to worship.”

The laugh pealed free from her chest before she could stop it. “Oh, no. How long have you been sitting on that one?”

“Since Florence, at least.” Steve grinned, unrepentant, and she could write paeans to those particular shades of blue, the sweet softness of a good night’s sleep hiding in the crinkles by his eyes. The clock by their bedside read _9:00 AM._

“Maybe we could sleep in,” Natasha agreed. If it meant more time with Steve’s bedhead, and this particular warmth. Natasha was finding that, given full license, she was a greedy person: about food, about hot water, about touch. And time. Time wasn’t something she’d given herself permission to hoard, before. So, too, with Steve. Selfishness—maybe that was part of living, too. They could both do with a little more of it.

“Right answer,” said Steve, tucking his face against her neck happily. He fell back asleep easily; Natasha followed soon after.

_._

_._

_._

At night, jasmine in the garden. The moon, full and forgiving. Natasha, alone, on the balcony, listening to the waves lapping—proof of a planet in motion, orbiting around a burning star. Clint, adjusting the aid in his ear, cocking his head in the wind.

_Hear that, Natasha?_

_A song for the living._

_A song for you._

**Author's Note:**

> hmu on [tumblr](https://amillionsmiles.tumblr.com/) or [twitter](https://twitter.com/mnonoaware)


End file.
